What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (One World Essentials)

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Years ago we talked about these environmental factors as “social determinants of health.” Today we call them “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs) or “toxic stresses.” These new concepts take things a step further than the old model in two ways. First, they emphasize the importance of adversity in the developmentally vulnerable window of early childhood. A child’s first years are the most critical in her development and set her up for the rest of her life. It’s crucial to understand this. The other new concept is our realization that a child’s neuro-endocrine-genetic physiology can be altered. Prolonged, extreme, and repetitive stress or trauma—due to exposure to an ACE, including poverty, racism, violence—chronically activates stress hormones and reduces neural connections in the brain, just at the time in a child’s development when she should be growing new ones.